


Mirror messages from the underground

by Slant



Category: Ever After High, Записки из подполья - Фёдор Достое́вский | Notes from Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Genre: Existentialism, Past Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-03
Updated: 2017-03-12
Packaged: 2018-04-17 02:22:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 2,513
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4648614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Slant/pseuds/Slant
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An exchange student from Russian Classic Lit High causes some bewilderment amongst the Royals and the Rebels.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue/Legacy  Day

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sure that my readers are of course familiar with both Mattel's modern retelling of classic fairy tales and Dostoyevsky's paean to free will. What may have slipped your attention is that while the narrator of Notes from the Underground is unnamed in the work, there is a convention when discussing the work (at least in English) to refer to him as "Underground Man". My OC in this, Underground Girl is his daughter. It is her destiny to be be herself at any cost and against all things. Which would be a lot nobler if she was less bitter and ineffective.
> 
> Apparently Clara Lear is canon, so UG is probably just a matter of time.
> 
> ... and Monster High: Haunted mentions "Ghostoyevski" (presumably he ghost-wrote "Notes from the Underworld")

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Honestly, if they hadn't built the overarching plot around Raven's rather wet refusal to sign up for death by red-hot shoes, I'd probably have sat back and enjoyed the fact that Maddie is canon. But they did, and then I had to read Notes from the Underground just to see refusal done right.
> 
> Raven can deny fate the abstract concept, but she doesn't even try to defy the predestination of lifestyle, studies and personal destiny determined by her high school clique until ... what? she tries princessology for 15 minutes?* Ugh. 
> 
> *Somehow I remembered her line as being "Smiling is tough" which I thought was a rather witty reuse of Teen Talk Barbie's infamous "Math class is tough!" line. Alas, this seems to be something that I dreamed.

"Who is she?"  
Blondie Lockes, of course, had done her research just right.  
"The school records say that she's an exchange student from Russian Classic Lit. High. The daughter of a minor official in the civil service. Do you know anything about that place Duchess? "  
It should be impossible for someone with Duchess's complexion to pale. She managed it, and turned it into an elaborate swoon. "Of course they are one of very few places with anything like the number of Princesses we expect, but..."  
She hesitated. One of the sisters Karamazova murdered a man with the blunt of an axe; the school authorities had concluded that, since there was no god, it could not be immoral. It was quite alarming to think what they might do if they caught you telling fairytales about them. "There's a reason that my family get turned into swans." Her arms describe a graceful arc, suggesting flight, either in the form of wings or simply from something terrible, "sooner than live in St Petersburg. Everyone there is very... complicated."

...

Apple declared her identity and her commitment to her destiny with flawless poise and a complete lack of self-conciousness that had Cedar looking for the strings. She was perfect like porcelain. She had hardly left the stage when Underground Girl stalked on gracelessly, head down, shoulders hunched, her whole body clenched with an awful will. 

She grabbed the top of the podium and glared out at the assembly; her jaw worked and the microphone picked up the sound of teeth grinding.  
"I refuse." she spat, into general consternation.  
"But you must. If you don't pledge your destiny, your story ceases to exist." said Headmaster Grimm, looking positively distressed.  
She lent forward. Her slender frame did not lend itself to looming. She managed. Her knuckles whitened on the podium.  
"Many fine advantages may come from signing." She slammed her fist into the wood of the lectern, "much harm comes from not."  
"I refuse." she repeated, with a face like a clenched fist.  
"What has made you conceive that I want an advantageous choice? What I, what _anyone_ wants is their own choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead."

Later, Mr Wolf graded her performance. Near-professional levels of tightly-controlled rage. She'd go far.

...  
Oh, you can't help that,' said the Cat: 'we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.'  
'How do you know I'm mad?' said Alice.  
'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'

...

Maddie didn't understand Underground Girl, but that was fine. Maddie didn't get most of her classmates. Like the rest of the Wonderland contingent, she'd met her first neurotypical person when she left Wonderland, and while she knew that they could be perfectly hat-tastic, they still made her a bit twitchy with their "rational decisions" and "linear experience of time" and the way they would insist on doing possible things. I mean, what is even the point of a time that isn't tea-time? Underground Girl drank her smoky black tea around a cube of sugar held between her crooked teeth and had asked if the haberdashery and tea shop had a samovar. Maddie understood about missing home, the flavour and the colour of it, so she'd reached into the space behind her ear and pulled one out.  
"It's on the house," Maddie said, as the table warped and grew and she settled it carefully on one of the new chimneys.  
"To thank you," she explained, concentrating furiously to keep the words in order, to make them say what she meant. It was so much easier, in Riddleish*.  
"For the upset of established order. It was like a window to home."

*The future lost/A spanner tossed/We wake to see/A cup of tea.

...

"Such gentlemen--that is, the "direct" persons and men of action ... I envy such a man till I am green in the face. He is stupid."  
\- Notes from the Underground, chapter 3

"Driving Me Cuckoo"

"Oh no! they're in the wrong forest!"  
"I say we pitch in and do something about it! Come on!" exclaimed Apple White.  
Underground Girl registered at least five separate emotions. Envy of Apple for her easy decisiveness and her confidence in the rightness of her choices. Contempt for Apple- the cause of her confidence was, after all, her stupidity. Contempt of Blondie and the other lost girls; the Dark Forest wasn't the seething abyss of despair and gloomy purposelessness that the Cherry Orchard back home was, but it was still pretty easy to distinguish from the bucolic loveliness of the Enchanted Forest. Suspicion that Blondie had not made this error unassisted. Confusion and maybe something else hard to define but precious at being included in "we". Torn between these imperatives, she made no comment but drifted, rudderless in the wake of her more self-assured classmates. 


	2. Spring Unwon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Underground Girl needs no magic to be hateful, annoying and ineffective.

When the Wonderlanders reached the fairest it was Too Late. Ironically, the white rabbit did not arrive with them. Their classmates stood, sunken, dull and lifeless, except for Underground Girl, who was hextoring the staff at a candyfloss stall.  
"A boohoo, your life is devoid of meaning or worth and you're wearing a humiliating cardboard hat. Big whoop. My life is devoid of confectionery. One of these things can change for the better, so make with the sugar."  
"What's going on?!" said Alistair; it is like he only existed so people can exposit to him.  
Underground Girl glanced around at the slack grey Ever-Afterians. She looked just as she had on Legacy day: tightly wound and glaring.  
"Their stories are gone. They are coming to terms with their existence as brief creatures cursed with awareness of their own insignificance." She allowed herself a brief smile, "Once they start breaking things as a desperate cry for attention, it'll be just like home."  
"How can we help them?" asked Bunny Blanc.  
"Oh Bunny, that's a kind thought, but the struggle for meaning is something everyone must do alone. I mean... it might help them to know that to live without fear, one must first live without hope."  
"Tell me how we bring the Wonder back or it's..." Lizzy raised a vorpal finger and left the threat hanging. Underground Girl deliberately misunderstood and continued talking in philosophical vagaries.  
"I'm sure that they can learn to create their own meaning... Think of it a an opportunity for them to grow as people."  
Maddie sighed. Being deliberately, aggravatingly obstructive was certainly very important to Underground Girl, but she'd never really worked out why. It was a thing she chose to do, not because it was good or evil or part of her story or a defiance of her fate, but because she could. Maddie tried again.  
"It would mean a lot to me if you'd help me find the map to the Well of Wonder."  
Underground Girl grinned at Maddie. She was secretly filled with shame and, simultaneously, with an almost unholy glee; she was being difficult for no reason other than she could; it was a relief to relent.  
"See? You're already doing things solely because you choose to. Fine, since you asked for selfish reasons. Apple White's got it but she's evil now, as well as being stuck in a fugue state of hexistential dread. Oi! Dark Pear! Gimmie the the map or I'll do to you what the Grand Inquisitor did to the Good Man."  
Apple White barely responded, but she looked up, more confused than frightened, and more disinterested than confused.  
"Why should I help you?"  
"Why not? It's not like your enjoying me not knowing where the well is."  
It turned out that threatening to and then actually talking endlessly about the nature of human suffering was not an effective way to get the book out of Evil Apple, but Kitty was helpful and her mother was amendable to reversing the recently-established order and between them they fixed things. 

...

Once the magic came back, Maddie and Underground Girl sat on the Ferris wheel as the stars came out.  
"So how does it really work? Why were you still you?"  
"Look up at the sky. See the stars scattered like diamonds on black velvet. Know that they are so far away that the light reaching you is older than you are, that it travels so fast as to boggle your mind. Observe the unappeased and hungry void that lies beyond them, vast, pitiless, empty and endlessly ravenous. Now say 'the important thing here is what I think about it, and I think it forms an adequate background to sitting here, having tea with you'."  
She reached out and prodded Maddie's finger.  
" 'course, feeling insignificant is probably harder when you're nine foot tall."  
"Hey! That's my tea-drinking hand!"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am deeply ashamed of "hexistential".


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dragon games snippit

"You're on the road to being Evil now dear, toss Snow White and those teachers into the void."  
Mocking laughter came from the so-called void, followed by Underground Girl.  
"That was philosophically unsatisfying. It turns out that the true Abyss was in my heart all along." She said. Then she made a disgusted noise. "That wasn't Unbeing. That was just a bunch of purple swirls."   
She brushed voidstuff off her dress; it fell to the floor, which started to sag.


	4. The Wake

Underground Girl had died the way she lived: spitefully. Not on an adventure, or trying to help someone, but of an easily -treatable liver disease for which she had refused to see a doctor. The graduates of EAH were not strangers to death or violence; fairytales were bloody things, but this pointless loss of someone that it was very difficult to actually like was outside their normal coping mechanisms. Tomorrow headmaster Grimm would be presiding over the official funeral ceremonies, saying the things that had to be said. Tonight, the O'Hairs had organised something more personal and rowdier, a sort of wake.  
The students were going round the circle, telling stories, trying to turn Underground Girl's hateful life and pointless death into meaning.  
" `Rebelling against your heritage is an empty gesture. Whatever you do, it is always the thing that you would have done.` She said that, the first time I met her." said Raven. She spoke first, and if it was because she felt she should lead, or because she wanted to speak, or to end the awkwardness of not knowing how to start, even she didn't know.  
Apple laughed, reached over to squeeze her hand and said "I'm sorry it's just what she said to me was `Embracing your destiny is the terrified act of an intelligence that refuses reach for its own petty limitations.' "  
"It never really mattered what you were doing or why, she'd understand you instantly and then hate you for it. Truly, she was the worst of us."

...

"I was just thinking... This party is for her. She'd have hated that."  
Ashalyn laughed, "Oh she would have. Did I ever tell you, about the forest fairy ball? She didn't want to go, but we'd done something that made her think that we didn't want her to go. You know how socially paranoid she was."  
Faybell interrupted, "That was mostly me. I said she wasn't good enough. It wasn't the year I tried to scam your invites, it was the year after. I knew better than to mess with you lot by then, but her... I always felt that she appreciated me hating her, even if she despised the way I hated her. Like ... Like I was doing it wrong. Like she was always stopping herself from telling me `No _this ___is how you spite.' I'm still a bit afraid that one day I'll find out what that's like, to rage so completely at the world as she did."  
Ashylyn took up the story again, "So she went. She got lost in the forest. There's fairies that to this day wake up screaming. She got there. And when she got there she's like ... well I'm here to spite /them/ and that group of people is beneath me, and I'm snubbing one of the people in that group over there, so there's nobody to talk to right? She walked up and down in front of the buffet table, scowling like a thundercloud for four hours. I swear. Four hours. And then Cedar goes up to her- Cedar was late, we'd ... oh I hate to say it but it's what we'd done. We'd lied to Cedar constantly for a month about this party. We'd treated her like a mushroom. I mean we kept her in the dark and fed her bullshit. "  
"We were awful kids. I mean it sort of made sense, with her curse, but still, what a bunch of little shits we were."  
"Yeah. And she was such a sweetie about it."  
"And we kept doing it."  
"I kinda hate myself now."  
"UG would love to hear that."  
They raised their drinks and toasted her vicious, hateful memory.  
"Sorry Cedar."  
"You did all apologise at the time. I'm still not sure which occasion Ashylyn's talking about."  
"And Ceder goes up to her, innocent as can be, and asks if someone's played a mean trick on her, too. A `mean trick'! You really were a beautiful cinnamon roll. Underground Girl had never imagined anything as sweet as a `mean trick' in her life; she assumed every social interaction was vicious mockery, and probably cover for conniving character assassination. But Cedar's Cedar, right? There's nothing hidden about her motives, she's just seen someone hurt and upset and gone to help them."  
"Oh! that party! Yeah she seemed really upset when I got there, but she calmed down pretty fast. I said that sometimes people didn't realise how much it hurt when they treated you like you couldn't be trusted. Five minutes later and she was chatting with me as sweet as can be, but there's something off- she was mad at herself for calming down just because she had someone to talk to, like ... responding to someone caring for her made her weak? And why couldn't she rage to the heavens until the thunder answered her like Clara ? So I had to talk her through that mess of feelings too. She was like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, only each matryoshka layer was horrible feelings."

...

It was weird. UG had never been capital-E Evil, and served no important purpose in a story - in her own story she did nothing very much. but she was unpleasant and rude and still there would be a gap where she should be - absences in conversation where the girls waited for her to say her part, a perspective that they had come to expect which would no longer be voiced.  
"We will all have to step up and fill the void she left."  
"Everyone is always walking into the void."  
"Oh nice one. "

 

CODA  
"Come on!" cried Apple, "we've got to help."  
As they ran off, Maddie stumbled.  
"Are you okay?"  
"Its just that... If Underground Girl was here she'd have said something bitter and gnomic about Apple's enthusiasm for helping people."  
"I miss her too."


End file.
